Seiji Ozawa

Early in 2010, conductor Seiji Ozawa was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He said he’d take six months off for treatment and then return to conducting.

As it turned out, that objective was a bit optimistic.

Ozawa’s cancer treatment was a success, but when he tried to return to the podium that summer, severe back pain laid him low. Ozawa had to give up his post as music director of the Vienna State Opera (Franz Welser-Möst succeeded him), and cancelled a December 2010 European Tour.

Ozawa underwent surgery for herniated discs in January of 2011; that knocked him out of Carnegie Hall appearances in the spring of 2011. In August of that year, he was able to conduct a performance of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, but fatigue kept him from the tour of China that was to follow. Then in February of 2012, pneumonia struck.

The following month, Ozawa admitted that "I had too much faith in my own physical strength … Even if I didn’t feel anything during performances, once they ended I was always terribly exhausted." His physicians recommended more rest. However, he promised that from spring of this year (2013), he’d resume work "little by little."

As of today (19 February) the prognosis is good: Ozawa has just announced that he’ll conduct at this summer’s Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto, Japan. (Ozawa is the festival’s founder and director.) In August, he’ll lead a performance of Ravel’s Les Enfants et les Sortilèges.

Ozawa, who’s 77 this year, is probably best known to American music lovers for his 29 years with the Boston Symphony. Although the later years of that record-breaking tenure were marked by complaints from critics that he’d allowed the orchestra to decline, Ozawa was a well-liked figure in Boston. His fans were often delighted to spot him out and about in his off hours, something Boston music lovers didn’t get much of with his BSO MD successor, James Levine. Ozawa was a Red Sox fan, for example. Levine, not so much.

Here’s hoping that Maestro Ozawa’s physical trials are finally behind him, and that he’ll soon be back to a full conducting schedule.

Bach at the Keyboard

Bach was only 19 in 1704, working at his first church gig (or second, depending on how you count what amounted to lackey toil at Weimar) when a rare opportunity arose.

I’m neither clergyman nor Lutheran, but my understanding of the Lutheran Church Year – the calendar by which Bach effectively lived his work life – is that it begins with Advent, the 4 weeks before Christmas. The calendar’s other major anchor point is Easter, if I can call a floating date an anchor. Easter is the first Sunday after the full moon after the Spring equinox, and that date determines all the dates from Epiphany on.

To account for this movable feast, the Lutheran calendar has a variable number of Sundays after Trinity. Usually it’s between 23 and 26. Only rarely – when Easter falls between the 22nd and 26th of March – does the Lutheran calendar have a 27th Sunday after Trinity. Bach’s rare opportunity to compose a work for Trinity 27 came in 1704. And for that special day, Bach composed – nothing special.

But that shouldn’t be a surprise. It wasn’t in his contract! Bach’s job was playing organ at Arnstadt’s New Church. Yes, he was one of a long line of Bachs who had done that job (and a well paid one it was, despite the church’s feeble budget). But nothing formally or legally compelled him to compose a special large-scale work for the 27th Sunday after Trinity in 1704.

Special large-scale works weren’t part of his job; yet not even a year hence, Bach would feel the sting of rebuke when the church’s elders berated him for not composing enough of them. (Of course, that might have been just piling-on, while they were about chastising him for getting into an altercation with one of the church’s musicians. Remember, Bach was then what we would consider college age.)

Did Bach carry a vivid memory of this verbal caning for over a quarter-century? Is it possible that he simply regretted not having written anything for Trinity 27 in 1704? Could one or both of these be the reason, or reasons, that the cantata he composed at Leipzig in 1731 is such a masterpiece?

Some historians and commentators think Bach put the extra time and effort into Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme simply because Trinity 27 was such a rare event. Maybe. But Bach was an eminently practical musician. Many of his Leipzig cantatas show clear evidence of his compositional short-cuts. Wachet Auf, though, is as finely wrought as anything he could have expected to use year after year, despite the fact that he had only one other chance to use it in his 16 years in Leipzig.

Bach did borrow his chorale melody and part of his text – an entirely normal practice. He got them from Philipp Nicolai’s hymn of the same name. In 1599, when he composed it, Nicolai had just survived a plague epidemic. If that left him feeling especially inspired, that would certainly be understandable!

Nicolai’s work accounts for 3 movements of this symmetrically-structured cantata, including the most famous, the central one. Who wrote the text for the other movements? We don’t know. Picander is one possibility; Bach mined his words for other works. Some scholars even suggest that Bach himself may have been the poet.

Nicolai’s text is the Biblical parable of the bridesmaids awaiting the bridegroom. There’s a visual trick behind this text that Bach, numerologist that he was, surely would have appreciated. Look at the shape of the lines when you center them (first verse only shown):

It’s unmistakably the chalice, the symbol of the Eucharist – and in fact in early editions Nicolai’s hymn was printed this very way.

But Nicolai and Bach are not so pious that they miss the chance to connect at a worldly, even earthy, level with their readers and listeners.

For one thing, Nicolai evokes the medieval song form called Aube (morning song) in France and Wächterlied (watchman’s song) in Germany. These are thoroughly secular love poems! The watchman’s role in these songs is to alert the (illicit) lovers to the impending dawn, when they must part to avoid discovery and preserve their reputations – or their lives. In Wachet auf, the watchman’s job is to alert the negligent bridesmaids (the Church) to the approach of the bridegroom (Christ).

But that’s not all. Picander’s (or Bach’s) verses include an ardent love duet (movement 6), and introduce vivid images from the Bible’s fevered, almost erotic Song of Songs.

Here we find "My beloved is like a roe or a young hart" (2:9); Bach says, "The bridegroom comes, like a buck and a young stag." "His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me." (2:6); Bach’s bridegroom tells his bride, "At my left hand you shall rest, and my right hand shall embrace you." The Song of Songs poet writes, "My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies." (2:16) Bach says, "My beloved is mine, and I am his … you shall revel [graze] in Heaven’s roses." We even find watchmen in the Song of Songs: "The watchmen that go about the city found me: to whom I said, Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?" (3:3)

Even though Bach programmed this cantata no more than twice in his lifetime, today it’s one of his best known and most frequently performed. In fact its central chorale is one of his most oft-played works of any type, with arrangements available for nearly every imaginable instrument, from clarinet to ukulele. You may know that chorale better by its English name: Sleepers, Awake.

Gustav Mahler, 1892 (Wikimedia Commons)

It was quite an honor for a young composer – a chance to play his latest work for a master conductor – and Gustav Mahler accepted it gratefully.

At the keyboard, Mahler glanced up from his score. Conductor Hans Guido Freiherr von Bülow’s hands were covering his ears! Mahler’s Totenfeier trailed off. "No, no," Bülow murmured. "Please, carry on."

Mahler’s first symphony, the "Titan," had premiered in 1889. He’d tried to deny that it had a program, but eventually admitted that what he had in mind was "a strong, heroic man, his life and sufferings, his battles and defeat at the hands of Fate."

With this new work, Totenfeier – Funeral Rite – Mahler was burying his first symphony’s hero.

Mahler arrived at the final notes of the Totenfeier. The room fell silent. Long seconds ticked away. Bülow sat, silent, staring. Then the words poured out: "If what I’ve just heard is still music, then I no longer understand anything about music."

Mahler was crushed. The critics had written after his first symphony that Mahler was a fine conductor – but, like most fine conductors, he had no future as a composer. Now this. "I’m thinking of giving it up," he wrote to his friend Richard Strauss.

He didn’t. Nor did he allow Bülow’s judgement to turn him away from his work. And, as it turned out, Bülow would have yet another role to play in the composition of what would eventually become Mahler’s second symphony.

It took Mahler another 2 years to make further progress on the symphony. By that time a mildly revised Totenfeier had become the symphony’s first movement. Once he’d finished the symphony’s andante second movement in July of 1893, Mahler almost immediately composed the third, a scherzo.

As a study for that scherzo, Mahler had written a song, a setting of a text from the German folk poetry collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). The verse he chose was "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" (St Anthony’s Sermon to the Fishes). This tale had significance for Mahler, as we’ll soon see. In his Hamburg study – Mahler was chief conductor of the State Theatre there – hung an artist’s image of this aquatic sermon. It was a sermon politely and attentively received by the saint’s scaly audience – and an entirely ineffectual one.

That same month, Mahler briefly set aside the symphony to compose music for yet another Wunderhorn verse. "Urlicht" carried a decidedly more optimistic tone. Initially, Mahler meant it for his collection of Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs.

Now Mahler had the first three movements of his symphony. He’d already realized that the largest orchestra wouldn’t suit the statement he wanted to make with its finale, that he’d need a chorus. But what words would they sing? Nothing seemed quite right. Not even his beloved Wunderhorn collection yielded his text.

So things remained through the rest of the summer and the winter of 1893.

It was Bülow who gave him the answer in the spring – though not in the way Bülow might have preferred. In early February of 1894, Bülow had gone to Cairo, searching for relief from his failing health. But five days on, the spark of life winked out for Bülow.

Bülow’s body was returned to Hamburg. On the 29th of March, Mahler attended his memorial service at St Michaels. "It hit me like a lightning bolt, and everything became plain and clear in my mind!" Mahler told a friend. The choir had sung Friedrich Klopstock’s Resurrection Ode in Bülow’s service: "Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n, wirst du, mein Staub, nach kurzer Ruh!" ("You will rise, my dust, yes, rise, after a brief rest.").

Mahler had the text for his choral finale. Or, rather, for some of it; in the end, he chose what suited him from Klopstock, and wrote the rest of the words himself. Three months later, the finale was finished.

But Mahler was still not satisfied with the symphony’s structure. He thought the lightness of the second movement, the andante, was too much of a contrast with the massive first movement. He didn’t like the transition between the scherzo and the finale, either.

The second problem he solved by inserting the "Urlicht" song between the 4th movement and the finale – the first time any composer had done such a thing in a symphony.

For the first problem, he experimented with placing the scherzo ahead of the andante. Ultimately, though, he decided to go with plan A – andante first – and suggest that the conductor allow an interval of "at least 5 minutes" between the first movement and the andante.* (In one performance Mahler conducted, he also inserted a pause between the 4th movement and the finale. In the end, though, he thought better of it, and said that the finale should immediately follow the "Urlicht," with no break at all.)

So exactly what was it that Mahler needed to say in his second symphony? Why did he need a massive orchestra, two soloists, and a chorus? The subtitle, "Resurrection," might lead you to think that he was expressing a religious idea.

However traditional it may be, though, that subtitle is not Mahler’s. He was not a religious man. Though he’d been born and raised in Judaism, Mahler didn’t much adhere to its precepts as an adult.

Mahler converted to Catholicism early in 1897, but that too had little spiritual significance for him. It was really just a way round Vienna’s virulent official anti-semitism, which had stood in the way of his directorship of the Vienna Court Opera. (As he left the conversion ceremony, he remarked to a friend, "I have just changed my coat.") Later, asked why he’d never composed a mass, Mahler replied that he couldn’t state the Credo and still maintain his artistic and spiritual integrity.

The real meaning of this music can be found in Mahler’s own words: "My [first] two symphonies are nothing but the full substance of my whole life."

Over a period of nearly 5 years, Mahler gave his listeners much more specific information about his second symphony, in the form of movement-by-movement programs. He wrote three in all. Even though he eventually withdrew them, I think they still provide useful context for the music.

Gilbert Kaplan, the businessman and amateur musician so taken with Mahler’s second symphony that he created the Kaplan Foundation to support study and preservation of Mahler’s music, and even studied and learned to conduct the work, has developed an analysis which draws from all three of Mahler’s programs. Here is a somewhat abridged and paraphrased version.

Movement 1: Allegro Maestoso. Mit Durchaus Ernstem Und Feierlichem Ausdruck. We stand at the coffin of a beloved person. His whole life, his struggles, his passions, his sufferings, his accomplishments, all pass before us. The distractions of everyday life are lifted like a hood from our eyes, and a solemn voice chills our hearts: "What next? What is life? What is death? Why do we live? Why do we suffer? Is it all nothing but a huge, frightful joke?" We must answer these questions if we are to go on living — indeed, if we are to go on dying! This answer I give in the final movement.

Movement 2: Andante Moderato. Sehr Gemächlich. You are struck by a memory, a ray of sunlight, pure and cloudless, out of the departed’s life. Surely you’ve had the experience of burying someone dear to you. Perhaps, on the way back, some long forgotten hour of shared happiness suddenly rose before your inner eye, sending a sunbeam into your soul — and you almost forgot what had just taken place.

Movement 3: Scherzo: In Ruhig Fliessender Bewegung. You awaken from that blissful dream. The surge of life in ceaseless motion, never comprehensible, suddenly seems eerie, like billowing dancers in a brightly lit ballroom that you gaze into from a distance so great that you cannot hear the music. The movement of the couples seems senseless. You imagine that, to one who has lost his identity and happiness, the world looks like this — distorted, as if reflected in a concave mirror. Life for such a person becomes meaningless. Disgust for every form of existence seizes him. He cries out in anguish.

Movement 4: Ulricht. Sehr Feierlich, Aber Schlicht. The voice of simple faith rings in our ears: "I am from God, and to God I will return! The loving God will give me a small light, will light me to blessed eternal life!"

Movement 5: Im Tempo Des Scherzos. Wild Herausfahrend. The finale starts with the same anguished scream that ended the scherzo. The Last Judgment is at hand. The earth trembles; the Last Trumpet sounds; the graves burst open; all the creatures struggle from the ground, moaning and trembling. They march in a mighty procession: rich and poor, peasants and kings, the whole church with bishops and popes. All cry and tremble alike because, in the eyes of God, there are no just men. Their fearful cries for mercy and forgiveness ring in our ears.

The wailing becomes more terrible. Our senses desert us; all consciousness dies as the Eternal Judge approaches. The trumpets of the Apocalypse ring out.

Finally, the graves are empty; the earth lies silent and deserted. Comes now the long note of the bird of death. Even it finally dies away.

What happens now is far from what we expected. All has ceased to exist. Then: the soft, gentle sound of a chorus of saints and heavenly hosts: "Rise again, yes, you shall rise again!" The glory of God comes into sight. A wondrous light strikes us to the heart. All is quiet and blissful. Behold: there is no judgment, no sinners, no just men, no great, no small. There is no punishment and no reward. A feeling of overwhelming love fills us with bliss and illuminates our existence.

*In today’s (25 November 2012) broadcast of the work, we’ll honor Mahler’s request – and simultaneously deal with our legal obligation to the FCC – by taking time out between the first and second movements for a station identification.

Leonard Bernstein conducts, 24 Nov 1963 (Columbia Broadcasting System)

Leonard Bernstein was in a fix. The man he’d supported for the presidency of the United States was to be inagurated the next day, and he was to launch a gala celebration at the White House with his own newly composed fanfare. But Washington’s streets were nearly impassable, choked by a blizzard.

It took a police escort, but Bernstein made it to the White House. Under the circumstances, a side trip to his hotel for a change of clothes was out of the question, so on the evening of 19 January, 1961, Leonard Bernstein conducted without his tails. The best he could do was a borrowed, outsize dress shirt as he led an orchestra assembled from musicians who’d plowed their way through the daunting weather.

Not that a lack of formal wear was going to exclude Leonard Bernstein from the Kennedy White House. He and John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been friends for years. Both were Harvard graduates; they’d met while appearing in a mid-1950s television special about life at the school. Politically, Bernstein had deeply held progressive leanings, so backing Kennedy was natural for him. He was also close to first lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

Two years and 10 months later, Leonard Bernstein – with all Americans – recoiled in shock and horror as the news reached him: an assassin’s bullet had ended the dynamic young president’s life.

Two days after those harrowing events of 22 November 1963, Bernstein took to television’s CBS network to deliver a musical memorial to his friend. He led the New York Philharmonic in a work he’d recorded just that year – Gustav Mahler’s transcendent, transformative "Resurrection" Symphony.

Though Bernstein’s was the first classical music broadcast to honor to the nation’s fallen president, his was not the first such classical performance. That honor may fall to Erich Leinsdorf’s impromptu reading of the second movement – the funeral march – from Beethoven’s "Eroica" Symphony. On the 22nd, Leinsdorf’s podium announcement of that day’s tragic events – an announcement captured on tape – came as a shock to most of the audience.

Herbert Howells

Shortly after the assassination, plans began to take shape for a concert that would bring Americans and Canadians together in tribute to the president’s memory. The English composer Herbert Howells (1892 – 1983) was asked to contribute a choral work to the observance.

Howells labored on the piece for months, but by the Spring of 1964 he still hadn’t settled on a text. Finally, he revisited words he’d set in Medieval Latin – but hadn’t published – in 1932. The words had given him comfort in the months and years after his son’s death from polio in 1935. This time he used Prudentius’s Hymnus circa Exsequias Defuncti in an English translation by Helen Waddell: Take him, earth, for cherishing. The poem speaks of the transition from Earth to Paradise; Howells’s music follows, evolving from a simple unison to reach its summit in rich, brilliant harmony.

It’s one of those odd accidents of the calendar that in 2012 the anniversary of this unthinkable American tragedy coincides with a day when we as Americans give thanks for the plenty that’s been granted to us. At such a time perhaps it’s worth remembering the part that music plays in helping us through our darkest moments.

After all, at its core, music is organized sound. If we’re to bring order and peace to this disordered, violent world, the place to start is inside our own hearts, where music’s quiet rigor raises a bulwark against chaos. As Bernstein said the day after his 1963 memorial concert, "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before."

Further Information:

Excerpt from Bernstein’s 1963 Mahler Concert (Youtube)

Leonard Bernstein’s speech at United Jewish Appeal benefit, 25 Nov 1963

Baritone Thomas Hampson on the origins of Mahler’s Urlicht (Hampsong Foundation)

Erich Leinsdorf conducts the funeral march from Beethoven’s "Eroica", 22 Nov 1963 (WQXR)

Notes and text for Howells’s Take him, earth, for cherishing (St Paul Sunday Morning)

Incipit (cantus part) from Canticum Trium Puerorum (Renato Calcaterra) Click to zoom

Now and again music history gives us personalities whose accomplishments range far and wide, well beyond composition. One such musician is Michael Praetorius. Not only did he leave us a good-sized body of music both sacred and secular, he created a reference volume that generations of early music researchers and performers have found invaluable: Syntagma Musicum, describing performing practice and musical instruments in the late Renaissance era.

Among Praetorius’s many publications of Lutheran church music is the collection Musarum Sioniarum: Motectae et Psalmi Latini. The 34th item in that volume is a setting of a text from the Latin Vulgate Bible.

In the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego – also called Ananias, Azarias and Misael – the three men refuse to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image, so Nebuchadnezzar has them thrown into a furnace. There, the story goes, they’re protected by an angel. They walk about in the flames, unscathed, praying and singing.

This text has come to be called The Prayer of the Three Holy Children. In the Latin Praetorius used, it’s Canticum Trium Puerorum – the song of the three boys. It’s not clear to me why they’re called boys or children when all of the biblical text refers to them as men, but those seem to be the terms used.

If Bach was the master of number symbolism (more detail here and here), Praetorius excelled at word-painting, at least in this work. Where his text is "bless the lightning and clouds," at "fulgura" (lightning) he zig-zags the music across the voices. At "nubes" (clouds) the music gets softer and darker.

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But Praetorius’s best word-painting is the trick he plays on us throughout the entire work.

Praetorius structures Canticum Trium Puerorum as a series of verses and two alternating refrains, on a text which exhorts all of Creation to bless the Lord. In the first verse, two high voices (they would have been the boys of his choir) speak of the angels and heaven.

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With each verse, Praetorius adds more voices. By the time he reaches the last lines of the text almost 20 minutes later, all of Creation is indeed singing – or at least all 8 voices in his choir.

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Our recording is from 1980 (regrettably, out of print). It was produced by Erato Records of France, with the Audite Nova Chorale of Paris and director Jean Sourisse. The choir is doubled in the refrains by a small cornett and sackbut ensemble. In general, when it comes to Renaissance music, there’s ample evidence to support the use of such doubling. However, some purists might insist that since Praetorius didn’t specify an instrumental ensemble, a pure choral reading would be safer, if you’re going for authenticity.

A reviewer for Gramophone also sniffed that the 38-voice choir was too large for Praetorius. I’ll stay out of this one and let that reviewer work it out with Praetorius, should they ever meet. I will say, though, that I suspect that reviewer would wax apoplectic if he heard Erato’s earlier recording of this work.

That older performance was my own introduction to Canticum Trium Puerorum, back when I was little more than a pup, musically speaking. This was long before the historically informed performance movement had made any real inroads, and it made no claims whatsoever to authenticity. Praetorius’s modest notes were sung by a massive 500-voice choir, doubled in the refrains by a blaring modern brass band (the Paris Police Force brass ensemble, if you can imagine that). It produced the sort of effect that, as the recording’s annotator pointed out, Praetorius could only have dreamed of.

That recording was distributed in the US over a half-century ago under the Westminster label, and later by Musical Heritage Society. It’s many years out of print. We’ll just have to make do with 38 voices.

This is an updated version of an article previously published in WKSU Classical on 2 May 2010.